That users seem to prefer Buell's "operational transparency" is a good takeaway from this. A lot of websites and web apps use some spinning animation to signal

That users seem to prefer Buell's "operational transparency" is a good takeaway from this. A lot of websites and web apps use some spinning animation to signal that something is going on. What exactly isn't clear to the user, and because these spinners have a tendency to keep spinning when something goes wrong, they can't be trusted. There's no sense of progress and really no sense of anything going on in the background either. If you instead display what you're loading, even if it looks like technobabble to the user, they will at least get a sense of something going on. Even just not hiding what's going on on the page while resources are loading seems preferable to me.